Monday 21 February 2011 14.02 EST
First published on Monday 21 February 2011 14.02 EST

Although he had been reluctant to work away from a television studio, Peter Phillips, who has died aged 85, was persuaded to take on the task of creating sets on dozens of filming locations for Granada Television's impressive 13-hour production of Brideshead Revisited (1981). The designer and his team evoked the decadent, opulent world depicted in Evelyn Waugh's novel about the aristocratic Marchmain family's decline between the two world wars. Phillips painstakingly transferred the visual details from the pages of the book to the screen, in a television production costing £10m – then a record.

Along with the leisurely photography and the beautiful period costumes, Phillips's sets helped to make Brideshead Revisited look sumptuous. These elements were combined with Geoffrey Burgon's atmospheric musical score, Jeremy Irons's mesmerising narration and a script – faithful to the novel – written by the producer Derek Granger with Martin Thompson, after John Mortimer's commissioned adaptation was abandoned. The result was a high point in the history of British television drama.

The production overcame many difficulties, including a three-month strike by ITV technicians that meant the original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, had to be replaced by Charles Sturridge. Phillips was responsible, with the producer, for choosing locations. Almost half of the 300 days' filming was at Castle Howard, in north Yorkshire, taking the story from the first visit by Charles Ryder (Irons) with his university friend Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) to the death of Lord Marchmain (Laurence Olivier) and Charles's wartime return to Brideshead as an army officer.

Phillips

The designer had to undertake major work – not just to decorate and dress rooms appropriately, but to create two new ones. A fire at Castle Howard in 1940 had ruined the garden hall, dining room and other areas. Phillips insisted the garden hall was needed to provide the magnificent vista of the fountain as seen through the house from the front entrance – and he had a blank canvas to work from when George Howard, the owner, had it rebuilt specially for the production. Phillips also transformed an empty basement space into the Brideshead dining room.

At Oxford University, he ensured that every aspect of Charles's rooms was as described in the novel. On the Maltese island of Gozo, which doubled for Morocco, he added Arabic arches to passageways; for shooting cabin scenes on a choppy Atlantic ship crossing, he had a set built on rockers. There was filming in Venice, and Phillips also recreated a New York hotel foyer in the entrance hall of a Trafford Park asbestos factory. For his skills, he won the 1982 Bafta award for best scenic design.

Born in Whitstable, Kent, Phillips attended Canterbury School of Art and worked briefly for an architect, before enlisting in the RAF in 1943. He was then an assistant to the production designer Laurence Irving on the film melodrama Uncle Silas (1947), which starred Jean Simmons. When no more film work was forthcoming, he became a designer at an aircraft factory near Wolverhampton.

Hearing about jobs at CBC's newly launched television service in Canada, Phillips moved there in 1952 and worked on light entertainment shows, before designing sets for Folio (1954-59), a series of single plays and music performances.

In 1959, he returned to Britain and joined the ITV company Granada, where his love of literature was given plenty of opportunity to thrive. Phillips was the production designer on the serialisation of HG Wells's Kipps (1960), the season of plays A Choice of Coward (1964), The Caesars (1968) and dozens of other classics, including War and Peace (1963), Persuasion (1971) and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1976), which starred Laurence Olivier.

Having enjoyed the challenge of constructing elaborate sets in studios, Phillips was initially apprehensive about taking on Brideshead Revisited, which was to be filmed entirely on location. He felt there would be little left for him to do, but was persuaded by Granger that it would present plenty of challenges. He found the experience rewarding, and subsequently designed Mortimer's 1984 feature-length television adaptation of the John Fowles novel The Ebony Tower, filmed in France and again starring Olivier. Phillips retired from Granada two years later.

He married Daphne Wilson in 1957. She and their two children – a son, Sebastian, and a daughter, Sarah – survive him.

•Peter Edward Sidney Canton Phillips, production designer, born 11 October 1925; died 10 January 2011